Social psychologist Dr. Mark Lepper is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. The seminal study he co-authored with his Stanford colleagues—“The hostile media phenomenon: Biased perception and perceptions of media bias in coverage of the Beirut Massacre” (Vallone, Ross, & Lepper,1985)—paved the way for a steady stream of subsequent media research in hostile media effects. Trained at Yale University in the tradition of Hovland’s persuasion work and mentored by presidential campaign consultant Robert Ableson, Dr. Lepper’s lifelong research focuses on motivation (intrinsic vs. extrinsic) and cognitive processes. His empirical research on attributional biases and inferential errors led to the theorization of hostile media effects (HME) phenomena. With a total of 328 cites in SSCI journal articles, HME has grown into a mainstream media effects theory. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the seminal 1985 study, Richard Perloff (2015) of Cleveland State University wrote a Milestone Essay in Mass Communication & Society, which returned HME to the spotlight. Riding on this momentum, the original researcher Mark Lepper looked back in this interview, to trace the theory’s deep intellectual roots, to speculate on its application in non-Western cultures such as China, as well as on future directions for research.